When I first started playing with the Dojo Toolkit, it was easy enough to use the CDN-hosted dojo.js and get started, but before long I wanted to make use of one of the features that drew me to Dojo in the first place: the build system that parses your code’s dependencies as expressed by dojo.require() statements and creates production-ready files.

Coming from a world where this was entirely a DIY affair, the patterns I should follow for taking advantage of Dojo’s system were, shall we say, less than clear. There was a lot of frustration, a lot of swearing, and a lot of pleas for help in #dojo on Freenode.

These days, I’m talking about Dojo a lot, and I’ve gotten pretty comfortable with how to set up a project — I even wrote a post about scaffolding a Dojo app once I felt like I had the basics down — but for a long time I’ve wanted to release a ready-made starter project, rather than making people follow seven lengthy steps.

With the help of Colin Snover, I’m pleased to release the Dojo Boilerplate, a simple starter project if you’d like to get your feet wet with Dojo and the power of its dependency management and build system. It comes with a bare-bones do-nothing app, a shell script for downloading the Dojo SDK and getting it in the right place, and a shell script and profile file for actually creating a built version. For the brave, it also includes a work-in-progress router for single-page apps — one of the few features that I feel Dojo itself is missing. Everything you should need to know is documented in the README.

I’ve also created a small demo app that uses the boilerplate and shows some of the basic concepts of MVC development using Dojo, including separating your code into models, views, controllers, and third-party services. It includes an example of templated widgets, which are one of the biggest selling points of Dojo for me, as well as an uber-basic example of object stores, new in Dojo 1.6.

The goal of the boilerplate and the demo app is to eliminate some of that pain and WTF that I went through — while Dojo is ridiculously powerful, the barrier to entry can seem daunting. Over and over again, though, I am grateful that I took the time to overcome it.

Finally: as always, pull requests and issues are welcome. Enjoy.

Update: Colin is now the maintainer of the boilerplate; I've updated the links above accordingly.